Macos – OSX 10.10 Yosemite slow on VMware

macososx-mavericksosx-yosemitevirtual machinevmware-fusion

I was having OSX Mavericks 10.9 in Vmware. It was working fine with VMware Tools installed and SVGA Drivers also. When Yosemite released, I updated it from App Store.
I cam across many problems on this update.

  1. Graphics are very bad
  2. It is too much slow

What i tried:

  1. I updated latest VMware tools from VMware site
  2. Tried to install SVGA drivers again (could not find update for OSX Yosemite SVGA drivers here. These drivers were working well with Mavericks and made it blazing fast in vmware in my previous experience)
  3. Rpaired file and folder permissions both using Mac OS X's internal utility and using CCleaner application also.
  4. Cleaned all junk files (e.g. temp files) using CCleaner

  5. Tried to increase Virtual Graphics Memory size using configuration file of Virtual Machine and adding this line to it

    svga.vramSize = "sizeInBytes"

  6. Came across a link on internet link here. It suggested to run application called BeamOff (download link available on same site) and add it to startup to disable Beam Sync feature of Mac to improve graphics

By using option 6 mentioned above, when i launched BeamOff application, it suddenly made graphics smoother. So i added it to login item so that it may start with login of Mac. But to my disappointment, this improvement in performance (graphics + speed etc) was not too much great as i was having when using OS X Mavericks.

My Virtual machine is having:

  • RAM: 3GB
  • HDD Space: 150 GB

What is problem/ What is want:

1.Speedup OS X Yosemite performance (graphics + speed) as i was having before in Mavericks
2. I am having resolution of 1366*768 but When i am at login screen of Mavericks, i am not having this resolution (some black margins from left and right, looks like 1024*768). It changes to 1366*768 resolution after login process is complete and desktop is loaded. Please note it was working fine when i was having Mavericks (have 1366*768 resolution at login screen and desktop both).

Best Answer

From my experience, Yosemite is using a lot more RAM than 3GB if you run it natively (no emulation). I imagine in virtualised mode it would take even more. I have 16GB installed on my system and Yosemite is using about 4-5 GB without any application running. Once I open other applications and run one or two virtual machines the available RAM can go down almost to under 1GB.

Virtual machines use a lot of RAM in Yosemite for creating file caches. For example, if I run a Windows XP or Mountain Lion VM in VMWare on a base Yosemite system and allocate about 4GB of RAM, VMWare will use more than that for caching files.

This is done for speed purposes, so that if you close the VM and want to open it later, it will take much less time to resume the VM if there is a file cache in RAM, than if there isn't one. You can test this by running sudo purge in the Terminal after you close a virtual machine, then re-opening it. You will notice that resuming the machine is much slower than if you didn't purge the RAM of the file cache.

Also, VMWare seems to not work well/recognise graphic cards in virtualised OS X. For example, I created two virtual machines, one with Windows XP and one with Mountain Lion. The Windows VM can play the same game, altough it's laggy even with 8GB allocated RAM, whereas the OS X VM can't even open the game, the application crashes at start. Which means the virtualised OS X doesn't even recognise there is an emulated graphics card.

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